About us
We are Tara and Damian, both in our early 50s and currently at the start of what we consider to be the most liberating phase of our lives!
Our Backround:
We met at University in 1992, got married 5 years later and set about the very conventional “Life route”. Graduate careers, house, mortgage and kids. Sounds straightforward, but in reality we’ve always had itchy feet.
I (Tara) have changed careers 3 times from accounting, to finance & banking, then finally to education, while Damian’s stint in the corporate world was short and sweet, preferring the freedom of working for himself as a heating engineer in his own small firm. As well as the day jobs, we have always had a project on the go, from building and designing our own home at 27 , to our more recent obsession, converting campervans.
It’s a bit of a joke between us that we have worked enough hours for two lifetimes! But its not all been about work. Right from the start we knew we wanted to travel, while most students spent their loans on beer, we used ours to fund our 1st holiday to Tunisia, and so it began.
Just a couple of years into our careers and feeling flush after the sale of our 1st house (a whopping £12k profit), we sat in Trailfinders travel agents and purchased round the world tickets with the One World Alliance. Damian quit his job and we took 3 months to embark on an epic round the world adventure! This is truly when the Wanderlust kicked in, you don’t really go back from hiking behind waterfalls in Guatemala, watching local kids playing in the rivers of Honduras or catching overnight trains through India. Travel was a non-negotiable and very much part of our family life through the years, and no doubt why we now have to fly halfway around the world to visit our children.
YOU KNOW THAT VOICE IN YOUR HEAD TELLING YOU TO TRAVEL? LISTEN TO IT. BECAUSE, 10 YEARS FROM NOW YOU'LL WISH YOU HAD.
Fast forward to 2022, with our two children having recently flown the nest our minds turned to how we wanted the next phase of our lives to look. One certainty was that this phase wouldn’t include the standard ‘work to retirement age’ route.
After losing my mum to cancer during covid, at the age of just 67 (the standard retirement age in the UK). It really made us start thinking about how short life is and how we don’t know what’s around the corner, in fact all the old cliches like ‘tomorrow isn’t guaranteed’ seemed to have a deeper meaning. The statistics around retirement are scary, with a high percentage of people getting ill or dying within a few years of stopping work, or having the funds but not the health to live out that bucket list. We were adamant that wasn’t going to be us!
The push came while we were on a 6-week Scandinavian adventure in our self-converted camper ‘Big Blue’. We revelled in the freedom of van life and hadn’t felt so invigorated in years, but at the time I was working in education, and we had to head back for the start of September and a new academic year (2022).
This is when we thought WHY? Why are we going back?
It turns out we were going back because that’s what we were suppose to do, we had commitments and jobs that enabled us to pay the mortgage and bills for a house we didn’t want to be in. At this realisation we said ‘NO!’ and made the decision that we wouldn’t be doing the same thing next September. We were both about to turn 49, but we were determined to be spending our 50th birthdays on a beach somewhere, with a very different looking life.
Anyone who knows us, knows that when we decide to do something we do it, all in! The following year took a tremendous amount of effort, organisation and commmitment, changing our family home into a holiday let business, but it was worth every second. By the end of summer 2023 we said goodbye to the rat race and set of on our 1st adventure, we haven’t looked back since!
Celebrating our 50th in Greece.
